[MRM]

Look at any manufacturing Fortune 500 company and you’ll find most of the salaried employee and almost all of management and executives have engineering degrees. Few of them have ever worked in the lab or in a manufacturing plant or have ever worked as a real engineer. Typical non-engineering career paths for engineers (that often require an engineering degree to start) are technical services, sales, marketing, all manner of logistics, technical writing, compliance, and purchasing/acquisition.

The shortcut to a senior position at a Fortune 500 company is an engineering undergraduate degree and an MBA. Few of them ever worked as an engineer in real life, but they need to be able to speak to engineers and understand technical issues when they sell, service, move or manage the widgets their company manufactures.

Another thought is that if he can do engineering, he can do math. If he can doMath, he can do finance. Also, if he likes the technical challenge of engineering but doesn’t like the actual engineering part of being an engineer, he might consider law school to be a patent or intellectual property lawyer. He could probably get a company to hire him full time and send him to school just to get him to work for them as a patent lawyer. They are in that much demand.